‘It Was All About Being Inquisitive’ – Vishnu Prasad – Best50 – Class of 2017

‘It Was All About Being Inquisitive’ – Vishnu Prasad – Best50 – Class of 2017

I was born and brought up in a small village named Venkateshwarapuram near Madurai in a farming family. Since my childhood days, I was inquisitive and passionate to learn new things ranging from politics to programming. This motivated me in participating and winning quiz and debating competitions at a young age. Though faced with many failures in these competitions, perseverance and passion kept me going and made me win a few.

After schooling, I joined B.Tech Industrial Biotechnology in Government college of technology, Coimbatore. During which I was selected to be a part TEDx event in which I served as a speaker coordinator as well as designer and this inspired me to be part of various other organisations like Rotaract, Evolve, etc. I also started going to Coimbatore Quiz club meets which increased my passion towards Quizzing and I started representing the college and winning various corporate quizzes like Tata Mutual Funds quiz, Economic times quiz etc., I was also awarded the Prime minister’s scholarship for the exceptional performance in academics.

Being a Biotech engineer, I was very much interested to know about the business aspect of it so I wished to do an MBA. I successfully secured admission in SJMSOM IIT Bombay on June 2015. I am a member of E-Club and PR team of the college and also the senior coordinator of E-Summit – IIT Bombay. I did my summer internship with Times Group in supply chain and operations domain. I made a cost savings of 60 lakhs in their supply chain & was awarded PPI for my performance. I have also won case study competitions like Marico – Over the wall campus round on a case study about procurement & category savings, National finalist of Vodafone’s telecom strategy competition on 4G network & secured a Preplacement Offer, winner in operations based live case study by Eureka Forbes – Infinite water, won second place in Asian Paints Campus round on a case study about Store layout analysis and won a live project opportunity through Johnson & Johnson case study. Two years of MBA has completely altered my understanding of businesses and gave a clear insight on how a business is conducted.

Give us an instance when you failed miserably and how did you overcome that downfall?

During my college days in Coimbatore, I along with my friends wished to start a college quizzing society and we organised the weekly hostel quizzing meet. It went well and we started winning national quiz competitions and soon college approved for the proposal. As it was final year and I was busy with my IIM/IIT interviews I couldn’t spend much time on it. When we left the college we found that the quiz meets became defunct in a year and I consider it as a great failure for me. Since then in an organisational system, I created a regular KT session for my juniors and created a knowledge database so that anyone can carry forward the task. I implemented it in E-Summit as a senior coordinator which helped the subsequent organisers to takeup the task easily.

How would you explain the “The Credit Crisis of 2008” to a 12-year-old?

Picture a see-saw it’s fun when they’re going up and down it’s not fun when they’re standing still that’s how our economy works real money and promises about money go back and forth in a constantly changing balance it’s called credit buying a house is a good example. Houses are expensive so people promised a bank more money later to borrow a little money. It is called a mortgage. They get the house today the bank actually owns the house that’s called collateral every month they pay a little bit back the bank collects a lot more money than they loaned out, in the long run, having the money to lend is called depository banking because banks have to maintain big deposits of money to loan out another way money and promises go back and forth is called investing businesses so basically there are two kinds of credit activities you could say depository banks and investment banks.

The Crisis

US government decided to more people get houses they sort of lowered the borrowing money side of the depository seesaw to help more people get on millions who couldn’t have afforded to promise house payments before suddenly could but it turned into what’s called a boom. Lots of people wanted to buy faster than houses could be built. The price went up people temporarily forgot that up is always balanced by down many big financial services companies sold mortgage-backed securities big bundles of promises and since house prices were going up investors worldwide thought they might return a lot of money. The thing depended on most homeowners making their mortgage payments then the house buying tipped back up some house payments became a lot more expensive.

Some people who promised mortgage payments couldn’t afford them they basically had to jump off the end and you know what happens when someone does that house prices dropped. The boom disappeared but the other end propped up the investment, the collateral houses weren’t worth as much as the long-term mortgage payments, without these banks had to use their own deposits to pay investors after a while they just ran out when a bank runs out of money to meet its promises it has to close down and thus the credit crisis happened.

If you had a magic wand, what is the one problem in India that you would magically wish away? Explain why.

Educational issue – Illiteracy & quality of literacy

PM of Singapore once visited India and said “schools are the biggest crisis in India” and that “it is a crisis that cannot be justified”. According to ASER Four out of 10 students between Class II and V in government schools could not read level 1 basic text and over six of 10 students could not read level II text. It is also reported that five of 10 students could not do subtraction or division.There are lot of programmes and there are too many of them—Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, Rashtriya Uchch Shiksha Abhiyan, Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat Model School Scheme and so on but the level and quality of education has not improved. Children not doing well is both an issue of quantity as well as quality so I wish Educational issues must be sorted out for a better future.